Trends
Colour
trends.
With a caveat worth reading first, because colour-trend reporting is the most circular writing in this industry.
What are the current event colour trends?
The clearest shift we can see is away from the fixed two-colour palette toward a warm neutral ground with one accent — more colours in the palette, fewer of them doing loud work. Read any colour-trend list, including this one, with scepticism: much of the genre is self-fulfilling, since a colour named as a trend becomes one.
Read this first. Colour-of-the-year announcements are made by companies that sell paint and pigment, reported as news, and then adopted because they were reported. That is a loop, not an observation. Nothing on this page comes from one of those announcements — it comes from what clients actually brief us with and what we actually build. It is still one studio's view.
01
1. Warm neutral grounds, one accent.
The two-colour wedding palette — a dominant and a secondary, applied evenly — is giving way to a warm neutral doing almost all the work with a single accent used sparingly. It photographs better, it survives a venue you cannot control, and it ages far more slowly.
Nell & Tobias · The Plate and Marisol Reyes Adler · Under the Awning both work this way.
02
2. Saturated colour is returning — but at night.
After a long period of pale everything, deeply saturated colour is back in the work we are asked for. Almost always for evening events, because those colours need artificial light to make sense.
Aria Nova · ULTRAVIOLET and Emma Molina · El Bautizo — the latter built in fuchsia for a baptism, which would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
03
3. Colour drawn from the venue, not chosen against it.
The most durable palettes we build start from what is already in the room — the stone, the wood, the light at that hour — rather than from a scheme imposed on it. It is the difference between a palette that photographs well at that venue and one that fights it.
This is also the least trend-like observation here, which is rather the point: it was true ten years ago and will be true in ten more.
04
The practical part.
Whatever palette you choose, three things matter more than the choice.
| Why | |
|---|---|
| Check it in the venue's light | A palette chosen on a screen in daylight and used in a candlelit room is a different palette. |
| Convert to print against real stock | The same hex prints noticeably differently on uncoated and coated paper. Ask your printer, not a converter. |
| Let the florist work within it, not to it | Nature does not produce hex values, and exact matching looks synthetic. |
Build a palette you can hand to a printer.
Five values by season and mood, with hex codes — free, and deterministic, so you can come back to it.
Open the palette generator